Earnings Sentiment

Sentiment Analysis of the earnings transcript to help figure out if there are any bullish or bearish sentiments that could be gathered from it. We're doing ML and AI based analysis on the earnings call to get some more insights.

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Sentiment Distribution

   

Earnings Call Transcript Word Cloud

     

Bullish Statements during Earnings call

Statement
We see -- like, across the Board, we just see tremendous benefits
We see better medication adherence
We have -- we talked about this at Investor Day, we have a growing enablement business that we feel is making great traction in the marketplace
We feel like most of our clients recognize that we feel good about our traction in the marketplace, despite some client losses that have gotten more visibility than perhaps our wins and our momentum has
We feel like they are well-positioned to perform well in 2024
But for now, I would say we feel reasonably good, which is why we reaffirmed the guidance this morning
So, we feel good about where that’s developing and inpatient in the fourth quarter, appears to be holding
Oak Street has performed exceptionally well in 2023, despite the pressures in Medicare Advantage
And with our two acquisitions, we feel like we got a strong foothold and platform -- foundational platform, across all three of those
We’ve seen very strong growth
MinuteClinic, which is a very good value
There’s a couple of things that I think should help those, all other things being equal, which would is, as you think about, perhaps, the inclusion of the fourth quarter data on trends, which were higher than what we had seen year-to-date September, that should potentially improve rates
And we know that as we think about things like GLP-1s and the pressures that they’re providing to folks that, we can drive net effective cost savings and do the things that our customers employ us to do very effectively
We’re very happy to have CVS back after a lengthy absence
We feel like we have world class capabilities
It’s amazing
In the ones that have been in the press where we’ve lost the business, we’ve retained specialty, which tends to be half of the account and one of a good source of profitability across multiple accounts
Where did it accelerate? Accelerated, we saw an acceleration in outpatient
Your enablement piece is really your affiliate model, if you want to think of it that way and the combination of what we had built internally through the CVS ACO, the very strong Caravan business and also some of the capabilities that we have from Oak
As we think about that unbundled versus the bundled, the NPS on the integrated offering is 15% to 20% higher than on the unintegrated offerings
We grew that business from less than a 100,000 members to 1.3 million, 1.4 million members at the end of 2023 and we grew in line with the market
And what TrueCost does is allows the consumer to experience that
They have a much larger provider business and larger Medicare block than we do with a lot higher constant, market share in duals, for example
And there are three CVS stores in every Oak Street MSA, right? And so there’s a lot of interconnectivity and as we think about some of the benefits of what we can do as our enterprise, I would point to probably two things that we’ve done
And so, that in and of itself will assist as we think about what that margin progression from 2024 to 2025 will look like
That’s helped for some of that new cohort growth to be more neutral to our earnings profile than one might typically see
So, the industry is, I think, in lockstep that we’ve got to recover some margin in 2025
We saw continued high levels of trend in some of our specialist categories, things like dental and vision, right? Not the OTC cards that we talked about in the third quarter
So, good morning, everybody
And we see a couple of things there that I think are really interesting
       

Bearish Statements during earnings call

Statement
And you also saw some pressure in our medical pharmacy category, which included things like immunizations
Now, we’ve seen some pressure in the reserves on the Medicaid business
And we’ve seen a lot more pressure than we otherwise would have projected at that point in time
We took pain to take a hard look at inpatient and that category was in control for the most part
And so, that pressured results in 2023, that will continue to pressure results in 2024 and that’s fully reflected in our guidance
Walgreens has lost probably a 1000 points of gross margin in its pharmacy if you do some backward math
January looked like it did run a little hot on the hospital side
It was another tough rate notice
A little bit of noise in individual, nothing that we’re worried about
So, the change thing aside, right? So, whatever visibility you thought you might have early in the year, you’ve got less visibility than you would at this point in time because of what’s been happening with change
You guys have lost a couple of contracts
I would say the likelihood that we exceed that floor is high
But as you look forward then to 2025, you also have to realize that for us, 2024 is a trough year partially because of stars
And so we know that there’s a -- beyond all the economic benefits, we know that there’s a consumer abrasion issue when you don’t have a fully integrated product
So, beyond the normal caveat of it’s early, just recognize that the change situation complicates your visibility at a time where you don’t have a ton of visibility to begin with
Now, when you level set, you’re going to see some movement, right? So that cross-subsidization may result in certain prices going up and other prices going down
I think it’s interesting to see where CMS is, because at the same time, they’ve squeezed MA the past two years with effective price cuts when you roll in Tukey and Stars, and the -- now they’re saying they’re conceding that V28’s like a 7.5% bad guy
That -- we’ve talked about the headwind being about $800 million inside this calendar year
Inpatient’s been a little bit noisy
And then number two, we’re noticing at least an uptick in rhetoric from some of the startups, the rhetoric against the evil PBMs
   

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